Cron can’t start PAM on FreeBSD

I was having these error messages in /var/log/cron: Feb 29 15:52:01 localhost /usr/sbin/cron[96178]: in openpam_load_module(): no pam_nologin.so found Feb 29 15:52:01 localhost /usr/sbin/cron[96178]: (CRON) error (can’t start PAM Searched the net, couldn’t find anything relevant. Eventually, though, figured out to /etc/rc.d/cron restart, and voila! Maybe something went hazy after upgrade.

Arch Linux and netcfg: make only loopback up by default

Here’s how I do it: $ cat /etc/network.d/loopback CONNECTION=’ethernet’ DESCRIPTION=’Loopback to localhost’ INTERFACE=’lo’ IP=’static’ ADDR=’127.0.0.1′ ROUTES=(’127.0.0.0/24 via 127.0.0.1′) #GATEWAY=’127.0.0.1′ #DNS=(’192.168.1.1′) ## For IPv6 autoconfiguration #IP6=stateless ## For IPv6 static address configuration #IP6=’static’ #ADDR6=(’1234:5678:9abc:def::1/64′ ’1234:3456::123/96′) #ROUTES6=(‘abcd::1234′) #GATEWAY6=’1234:0:123::abcd’ This file, of course, must be included from /etc/rc.conf, like this: NETWORKS=(loopback)

Clear exim queue

The queue can be viewed with mailq, which is the same as exim -bp. You can view individual messages using exim -Mvc <message-id>. Once you’re done, run exim -bp | grep -Eo “[[:alnum:]]{6}-[[:alnum:]]{6}-[[:alnum:]]{2}” | xargs exim -Mrm

logrotate complains about insecure parent directory permissions

I’ve received this message recently: error: skipping “/var/log/exim/mainlog” because parent directory has insecure permissions (It’s world writable or writable by group which is not “root”) Set “su” directive in config file to tell logrotate which user/group should be used for rotation. …and a few other of similar nature. Turns out /var/log/exim/ were indeed group-writable. Easy [...]

E-book manager and converter

I was looking for something to convert a few e-books from wacky new-age formats to something more universal, like text, HTML, or at least PDF. It’s Calibre, and here’s a list of supported formats. It’s got quite a dependency tree — python, imagemagick, poppler-qt (which pulls in qt), libusb (which pulls glibc), etc.. So it’s [...]

Dump audio from video, revisited

From some post on some mailing list: mencoder -v -ovc copy -oac mp3lame -o out.avi INPUT-FILE -ss HH:MM:SS mplayer -v -vo null -vc dummy -ao pcm -dumpaudio -dumpfile out.mp3 out.avi

ATmega168 documentation uses word addressing, avrdude uses byte addressing

I was programming USBaspBootloader into a metaboard with an Atmel AVR ATmega168 microcontroller. I always got this error: usb 6-2: device descriptor read/64, error -71 … usb 6-2: device not accepting address 21, error -71 1. USBaspBootloader’s Makefile specifies atmega168 and BOOTLOADER_ADDRESS=3800 by default. This is in hex addressing a byte, i.e. 0×3800. avrdude uses [...]

Transparent-background icons for Tor, Uzbl, Irssi

I made these from files available on the net.

Exim: force retrying delivery of mail in local spool

My mail got stuck in the spool a few days ago due to misconfiguration of ~/.forward. After fixing the file, the commands to force retry of delivery are: cd /var/spool/exim/msglog exim -M * or exim -qf Provided, of course, your shell is smart enough to do * expansion properly.

uzbl follow.js: link following with settable keys

EDIT: this script is no longer up-to-date and won’t work with the current version of uzbl. This is a diff to current follow_Numbers.js. The new script, which I called follow.js, is more versatile, since the characters used for labels and key navigation can be set using the hintKeys variable. 2d1 <  * Its pretty stable, [...]